"...lettuce will be $5 a head..."
Campesino picks 100 heads of lettuce an hour for $5 an hour. Cost to pick a head of lettuce: 5 cents.
I can buy lettuce for $1.28 a head.
For lettuce to be $5 a head, all else staying the same, the picker would have to be paid $3.77 a head. Times 100 heads an hour= $377.00/hour. or $754K per year, based on a 40 hour week.
Where do I sign up?
Bravo! I'll work for half that. (Is that how the market works?)
I've used a similar slovenliness argument. If lettuce is $1.30, and moving the wages from an abusivd $5.00 an hour to a generous $15.00 an hour moves the price to $5.00 a head, then these hard working migrants doing jobs Americans won't do are picking fewer than 3 heads per hour. Presuming the entire cost of lettuce is wages, an obvoius fallacy promoted by the supporters of illegal labor. Food pricing is a strawman. And if we can only grow lettuce with $5.00 an hour labor, let it be grown in Mexico, an increase in their wage scale and a significant saving in social costs for America. In theory, that was one of the objectives of NAFTA anyway.
Isn't it fun to deal with the misconceptions of those who are innumerate? ;-)